Achieving Business Excellence with John Spence

The Ten Elements of a Winning Culture

I have been working for the last several months on two new book projects, one of them is a “strategic life planning workbook” called Strategies For Success – the keys to success in school, career and life — and the other is a compilation of advice I’ve given to senior executives, CEOs and mentees that I have coached over the years. As part of working on that second book, I took a very serious and long look at all of the research I have on how to build a winning culture – the Great Places to Work study, a huge national Gallup poll, the Firms of Endearment study, the new Harvard study on the best places on earth to work and much, much more – and compiled it down to this new list I just created of what I saw as the pattern across all of this research. I thought you might find it interesting, I welcome any feedback, questions, suggestions.

Ten Elements of a Winning Culture by John Spence

People enjoy the work they do and the people they work with.

People take pride in the work they do and the company they work for.

There are high levels of engagement, connection, camaraderie and a community of caring.

There is a culture of fairness, respect, trust, inclusiveness and teamwork.

The leaders walk the talk, live the values and communicate a clear vision and strategy for growth.

Lots of open, honest, robust and transparent communication across the entire organization.

The company invests back in employees; there is a commitment to learning, coaching and development.

There is a bias for action, employees have an ownership mentality and always strive to give their personal best.

There is high accountability and a strong focus on delivering the desired results.

There is ample recognition and rewards and mediocrity is not tolerated.

PS – this list would probably act as a great internal audit, so if you want to you might try scoring it on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being excellent and 1 being terrible, and I would be concerned about any scores to drop below a 7.